The Champ team had the opportunity to attend the Vermont Web & Marketing Summit in Burlington, Vermont this past month and it was very educational and inspiring. Burlington, Vermont is a fantastic town beside Lake Champlain; it’s surrounded by mountains and right on the boarder of Canada. Autumn is one of the best times of year to visit Burlington, especially to enjoy the foliage, craft beer, and local creameries – truly the perfect place for web and marketing nerds to convene.

The Vermont Web & Marketing Summit is an annual conference of industry professionals looking to meet like-minded individuals and discuss the next big thing in web and marketing. This year was the largest conference yet and consisted of well-known speakers such as representatives from: Vermont Teddy Bear, Vermont Brownie Company, Middlebury College, UVM Medical Center, Cardinal Path, and more. These marketing and web professionals dove deep into how data and analytics can be monitored, utilized, and analyzed, to develop sound marketing strategies.

Speakers discussed topics related to SEO best practices, paid search, ad buying, social media for revenue, Google Analytics and Tag Manager, crafting a digital marketing plan, creative user engagement and relevance, and connecting content and key performance indicators. The main goal being how to identify where, when, and how conversions occur and learn from the findings. We call this performance marketing.

A few takeaways from the Vermont Web & Marketing Summit:

• Build a culture where it’s okay to test and fail – if you aren’t testing different marketing tactics then you will never know what works best for your business.
• Don’t use jargon – your target customer is unlikely to understand industry terminology so keep your marketing messages simple.
• Know what your customers are thinking – survey your current customers and learn how they view your business and what is important to them.
• Remarketing: spend your ad dollars wisely – your customers are unlikely to convert the first time they hear about you, so use cookie-based remarketing to capture them the second, third, or fourth time.
• Write great copy – copy writing and content is equally as important as design.

Marketers are using data, analytics, intelligence and science to measure marketing initiatives more than ever before. We were excited to attend the Vermont Web & Marketing Summit to discuss and learn from industry professionals. We plan apply to our findings to our Champ partnerships. Our goal as an organization is to provide our clients with a partnership and performance marketing goals, which can be clearly measured. We want to grow your business with you.